Posted
by
timothy
on Monday December 02, 2002 @02:35PM
from the good-thing-it-wasn't-palladium-protected dept.

eefsee writes "The BBC announced that the Digital Domesday project which had become unusable has now been revived thanks to the successful emulation of a 1980's era Acorn computer. Folks at Leeds University and University of Michigan did the emulation work. This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage. Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."

I'm curious as to whether this is technically legal under the DMCA. We all know that emulation is almost always in violation of intellectual property laws (doubly so when it is used to steal video games, as in MAME, Stella, and WINE), and I don't know why this would be any different. The Acorn ROM is probably proprietary. I'd hate to see such a valuable educational resource be marred by the taint of theft. Why don't we just start over and do it right rather than make up for our past errors by stealing?

This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage.

If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies before the existing technology becomes so out of date that recovering it becomes a Herculian effort, or it will also co-exist in a more future-proof medium. Otherwise it's simply dead data that's more than likely never going to have a need to be accessed again.... not every bit needs to be held forever.

Would the world have stopped turning if this little chunk of history gone unrecovered? No. Are there other forms of media (books, videos, music) from the 1980's that would have answered the same questions about culture and society that the data in this archive answers? Definately.

a recent visit to the Science Museum in London revealed many Acorn BBCs/Masters still running various demos - as per my last visit about 15 years ago... (probably not the same machines mind...)

interestingly a large number of NT based demos were not running due to DHCP errors - many of them displaying the errors prominently on huge projectors...

Hmmm... that could explain something. On my last visit, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine seemed to be hung up as well. It just sat there motionless the whole time I watched it. I suppose it might have been experiencing the same DHCP errors as the NT boxes.

There have been some electronic editions of medieval texts, notably the sole remaining manuscript of the poem Beowulf, which was written down in the early 1100s. Alas, it is proprietary, and you have to pay a rather large sum to the British Library if you want a copy.